In the last few years or so, conditions have been dire for the printed press. Small papers have gone of business, unable to find the money needed to survive. Large ones have seen their circulation drop by 10% a year.
General Secretary , PEN – Sri Lanka
And in a lot of cases, the papers have been racking up larger and larger losses. Like The Guardian, who expected to lose £90m in 2017 alone.
In other words, they need to evolve or die. But how can they do that? How can newspapers carve out a profitable niche in a world dominated by blogs and social media?
Well for one thing, they can stop trying to compete on quantity or speed. Full stop.
Because that will never work.
A printed publication cannot be faster than a website at getting news out to the public.
And this is especially true when the news cycle works at hyper-speed. I mean, one day isn’t a quick turn around any more. One hour is a moderately quick turn around, with a day being too slow and a week making you irrelevant.
So print cannot compete on that any more. Nor can any medium with a longer production time.
Instead, what they can compete on is quality. They can provide interesting, well written stories that look at current events in a much deeper way than your average social media pundit. Where every source has been spoken to, every piece of evidence has been carefully analysed and any arguments from different sides carefully thought through.
Yes, this won’t please everyone. The average guy who just wants a news story broken to him as quickly as possible won’t care for your editorials.
But nowadays, he’s probably not your audience anyway. He’s got his instant news, it’s called Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube. Or perhaps one of those blogs that can turn trending social media topics into a poorly proofread posts in about 20 seconds.
You cannot compete on that level. So focus on people who want to support quality journalism and who are willing to actually pay for it instead. It’s a niche, and it probably won’t pay a hundred staff.
Yet at the same time… it’s more sustainable than trying to chase an ever quicker news cycle. Be like the small coffee shops competing on service and quality, or the mum and pop business who actually listen to their customers.
Carve out a niche by targeting the people who care about quality.
Don’t lose millions by targeting those who don’t.
